“All About Birds,” but you’d never know it

Don Stap writes an incredible article about the migratory patterns of the Numeniini shorebird Bar-tailed Godwit and its yearly 7,000-mile trek to wintering sites from Alaska to New Zealand—but you’d never know it. Stap’s rhetorical writing strategy encompasses a number of strategies that he shares with Jonah Lehrer, a highly-talented neuroscientist and author. These strategies include the ability to write effective hooks lacking in scientific jargon, painting accurate portraits of his interviewees, and maintaining a reader’s dwindling attention.

Perhaps the most surprising tool that Stap utilizes (and something Lehrer doesn’t possess, or, maybe chooses not to) is his talent for imagery. Take, for example, Stap’s first paragraph of Flight of the Kuaka, All About Birds:

In February, at 37 degrees 12 minutes south latitude, the sun sets late, but night has fallen and the darkness is thick and close. In the hills to the west I see a few dull globes of light from distant houses. Above, the stars glimmer like chipped ice, but they cast little light, and I would like very much to see where I’m stepping. I am in a shallow pond about 100 yards west of the Firth of Thames on New Zealand’s North Island. And I am up to my shins in mud as slick as lard. Having given up all pretense of grace, I wave my arms about with each step, as if I’m on a tightrope. I hope not to fall into this black goop—the manure-enriched runoff from a cow pasture—as two people near me did moments ago.

There’s no understating Stap’s penchant for using descriptive words to capture an audience, but what’s interesting here is his ability to weave factual information into his descriptions: in the first paragraph, we discover time of year, physical location, and the fact that he’s accompanied by others. All this with a dazzling description of the starlight and New Zealand countryside.

Like Lehrer, Stap includes a short portraiture of the article’s main figure:

In his early 60s, with close-cropped white hair, Gill is the senior member of an international team of scientists analyzing the migration of godwits and curlews as part of a four-year project funded largely by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Gill’s voice rises with enthusiasm when he speaks of the bar-tails, and here in New Zealand his spirit is all the more buoyant because he’s wearing shorts and sandals; when he left Alaska two days ago, it was 10 below.

In a way nearly identical to Lehrer, Stap crafts an image of a sweet Bob Gill. But, in a way that is uniquely Stap, including factual information about his research project, and the source of it’s funding.